Strolling around in the beautiful old own of Sana’a in Yemen is a great experience or more honest: phantastic! In this old town some houses are a 1000 years old. And as it is part of the UNESCO World Heritage, a many of those houses have been renovated.
Despite tourists (like me) walking through this area, there is still a real life (what is this?). This means that the inhabitants seem not to cater only for tourists but have also their own, independent social and economic life. And as a result there is interesting food markets.
Looking at the presentation of produce in the market it seems that buyers seem to have rather larger families as most of the food seems to be prepared for bulk purchase. Furthermore it seems that the whole area is living a rather vegetarian diet as I did not come across butchers. I suppose they were somewhere else.
Coming from a Western country it is interesting to discover new produces and smells. Once more such an experiencing is indicating how manifold the world is, when it comes to food. And this makes life interesting.
Look at the different seeds, dried peppers and barley. Barley surprised me by the way, it is not too often found as a staple food in a cuisine.